1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of computer systems. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method for decision support in a virtual conference.
2. Description of the Related Art
“Web conferencing” or “virtual conferencing” refers to various forms of online collaborative services including web seminars, webcasts, and peer-level web meetings. Web conferencing systems today support real-time audio and video streaming between participants, typically under the coordination of a central web conferencing server. Applications for web conferencing include online classrooms, meetings, training sessions, lectures, and seminars, to name a few.
In some virtual conferencing systems, the meeting organizer or moderator is provided with control over the current state of the virtual conferencing system via a graphical control panel. For example, in a virtual classroom environment, the instructor is provided with the ability to choose the current speaker or group of speakers. Once selected, video of the current speaker or group of speakers may be displayed within a central speaker region of the virtual conferencing GUI.
When an instructor (e.g., professor, teacher) chooses to call on a student during in-class instructions, the choice of student to benefit from this learning opportunity may be unfair or inefficient. A choice may be perceived to be unfair because humans are prone to various cognitive biases (e.g., gender, or “availability” effects), which may affect a professor's decision in selecting a student to answer a question. An instructor's choice of a student may be inefficient because the educational value associated with calling on a student to answer a question varies and different students benefit to different degrees from attempting to respond to the same question.
Web conferences outside of the context of a synchronous classroom environment suffer from a generalized form of this problem; conference leaders often intend to be fair and efficient in how they engage other conference participants, but their attempts are impaired by various human biases and inefficient choices. Furthermore, to the extent an instructor or other moderator wants to be fair or efficient, he or she needs to expend both significant cognitive effort during the class/meeting to track as well as time pre- and post-class/meeting to prepare.
As a result of these limitations, some students (or participants) are afforded fewer learning (or speaking) opportunities than others and valuable learning opportunities are missed.